Jindal’s Underwhelming Prescription for GOP Modernization

Bobby Jindal restated his views on modernizing the GOP in an op-ed yesterday:

We are the party whose ideas will help the middle class, and help more folks join the middle class. We are a populist party and need to make that clear.

If Jindal believes that Republicans already are a populist party, that implies that he doesn’t think it needs to do very much to become one. It’s all very well to say that Republican ideas “will help the middle class,” but this continues to run the risk of simply asserting that they do when there isn’t much reason to believe it. Republican candidates can’t make it clear that theirs is a populist party when they tend to shy away from most ideas that might be reasonably described as populist.

Most of Jindal’s recommendations aren’t bad ones as far as they go, but as an argument for modernization there isn’t much to it. Four of his seven suggestions are concerned with presentation and messaging: 1) look forward; 2) compete for every vote; 3) articulate plans in detail; 4) respect voters’ intelligence. These are things that the last two Republican presidential tickets and many other Republican candidates have done very poorly, and it makes sense to adopt these recommendations, but it’s important to recognize that this does nothing to modernize the party. Another one of Jindal’s suggestions might sound appealing at first, but it gets something important wrong. He writes:

We must stop competing with Democrats for the job of “Government Manager,” and come up with ideas that can unleash the dynamic abilities of the American people.

These two aren’t mutually exclusive, and the former is probably much more important insofar as Republicans are losing elections because the public does not trust them to govern competently. Until the GOP regains its reputation for competence, or at least gives people a reason to believe that it is interested in the competent running of government, it won’t be and shouldn’t be trusted with the responsibility of governing.

Perhaps because his own interests are in domestic policy and because he is a governor, Jindal barely touches on foreign policy and national security. Having squandered a lot of its credibility on these issues, the GOP needs to review its assumptions here more than almost anywhere else. Few things cry out for more modernization than Republican foreign policy thinking, which at best remains stuck in the early 2000s and at worst remains wedded to an entirely outdated understanding of the U.S. role in the world more suited to the early 1990s than now. This continues to be a major blind spot for most national Republicans, including Jindal, whose throwaway line about “American weakness on the world stage” shows how much he and other members of his party rely on “mindless slogans” when it comes to discussing foreign policy.

The problem here is that the GOP is very much committed to its present policies and prescriptions, because of the donor base it has cultivated. If they were to change their actual policy positions to become a genuinely populist party, they might gain votes theoretically, but they would lose their donor base, and have to rebuild a new one. That would be very, very difficult.

The GOP is owned by its donors, plain and simple. So unless those donors actually change their agenda, and the policies that make them want to donate to candidates, the party has no choice by to follow them. So at best we will see some shallow gesture to “talk about these things differently” in the vain attempt to convince voters that their policies actually are populist, or even popular. As you say, they aren’t, so this just means trying to deceive people by various red herrings and emotional triggers, which they’ve already done, but which aren’t working anymore. So this isn’t really a very promising situation for the GOP to be in, being boxed in on all sides.

Daniel, I’ve been reading your posts for some time now. I appreciate the incisive commentary. Your comments have done much to challenge my general assumptions about what view conservatives should take on various matters, especially as related to foreign policies.

However, I’m wondering if you’ve written anywhere with positive recommendations? Your posts are primarily of the critical vein but rarely do I find positive suggestions.This is not a bad thing. But so much do I respect what you have said here that I long to hear from suggestions about what policies and ideas Republicans and conservatives in general *should* adopt.

This post is a good example. You write at the end: “Few things cry out for more modernization than Republican foreign policy thinking, which at best remains stuck in the early 2000s and at worst remains wedded to an entirely outdated understanding of the U.S. role in the world more suited to the early 1990s than now.” But do tell: what should be the U.S. role in the world and what would Republican foreign policy thinking look like when “modernized”?

The major problem with most Repubs is their mindless fealty to a destructive and counterproductive foreign policy.

If they want to be taken seriously, they should start with a repudiation the notion of the U.S. as “policeman” of the World, advocate bring our troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan, et al, and propose real and drastic cuts to the military. They could expose the Dems’ as it relates to their advocation of militarism and endless wars since Obama took office. And they could “box” the Dems in as it relates to entitlement cuts by displaying their willingness to cut their “sacred cow.”

“The economy dominated voters’ concerns at historical levels in the presidential election Tuesday, according to preliminary exit polls conducted by The Associated Press and the major television networks.

Fully 62 percent of voters said the economy was the most important issue, six times more than cited the war in Iraq (10 percent), health care (9 percent) or terrorism (9 percent). “

Jindal is part of the “where were you when” chorus, who is now backpedaling so quickly in order to sound reasonable and statesmanlike. But any quick Google search of Bobby Jindal will reveal that he is as much a part of the problem as Mitt Romney. He is an advocate of “intelligent design” being taught as legitimate science in the public schools and that’s for starters.

There is a parallel that I must note here. Whenever there is an act of rioting against America or a hateful, violent pronouncement against the West by some extreme Muslim individual another part of the world, conversatives always cry “Where are the moderate Muslims to denounce it?” and for lack of the appearance of those Muslims in the media, attribute those attitudes to all Muslims.

Well, now is the time to apply that same standard to the Republican party. It’s alright that the chorus is chiming now, after an electoral loss, but where were they when, and where will they be the next time?

For me, Jindal undermined his own credibility in his initial statement when he said that the party should not back off of its anti-choice and anti-gay-marriage stances, but should “moderate the tone” of their message (e.g., try to trick people into not realizing what the party really stands for).

In other words, he wants the party to compete for all 100% of American votes… except for people who believe in a woman’s right to choose and gay Americans’ right to legally recognized equality.